In a September Takimag piece, our old-fashioned doctor recounts his shocking first encounter with television after being away for a quarter century.

The debate between Nixon and Kennedy was Plato by comparison with what we have now, albeit that Nixon’s five o’clock shadow played some part in the public assessment of it. We are more intelligent and better educated than ever, but somehow public discourse becomes cruder, more stupid, more ill-tempered, less concerned with truth, as our cognitive level improves.